Louis Armstrong in his classic song “What a wonderful world” describes the marvelous world where he enjoys the green trees and the red roses, the blue sky with the white clouds and the colors of the rainbow, the bright blessed day and the dark sacred night; he sees friends expressing their affection and crying babies growing up. And all the time he reminds himself how wonderful the world is.

With a sarcastic disposition, Andrea Savva names his in situ installation in ArtWall What a wonderful, wonderful world… in an effort to describe the world we live in. He creates a web out of barricade tape, to suggest danger, whose knitting starts from scattered pieces of buildings and roads of the city, connected with the development of the Greek state. More precisely, for the artist the fragments originating from the neoclassical buildings are strongly associated to the independent and newly established Greek state of the 19th century, whose aim was, on the one hand, the connection with its classical past, and on the other, its absorption in a more European context.[1]Our need to be part of Europe and the West, together with our economic and political dependence on them, is still evident.

Savva invites the viewers to enter a stifling environment, a very limited vital space, a land in danger. The tapes or the lines drawn between countries and people, are not only dividing, but also hazardous, as they are unable to protect the citizens, while danger lurks everywhere, bluntly threatening life, daily reality and every sense of safety. On a universal level people suffer, wars wage, democracies crumble to pieces, political and economic suffocation dominates, ecological destruction tends to become irreversible, while terrorist attacks have become an everyday news item. Could it be though that viewers, within this threatening environment are expected to reflect upon their past and future? Is it possible for humanistic values to emerge and surface through the fragments, which will then define our future course and become the foundations of a truly wonderful world?[2]

Curated by: Stratis Pantazis

[1]The development of the neoclassical movement in the country is associated with the arrival of foreign architects such as the German Ernst Moritz Theodor Ziller and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and Greeks who studies in Europe such as Stamatis Kleanthis and Lysandros Kaftantzoglou.[2]Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W., Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente, Amsterdam: Querido, 1944/1947.

Andreas Savva
Born in 1970 in Kyrenia, Cyprus. He completed his studies in painting and his M.A. in Digital Arts at the School of Fine Arts in Athens. He lives and works in Cyprus and the United States.http://andreassavva.net/